by | February 21, 2012

Weekly Assembly: School Vacation Week

You’d think that the gaming would slow down over a school vacation week with so many students on vacation. While it feels like things have slowed down here at the Gamer Assembly, it looks like blogging has picked up across the ‘Net. We’re always looking for guest bloggers if you want to give us a shout. I’ll be putting together a post about that soon, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, enjoy the links!

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

  • March’s Blog Theme at The Gamer Assembly is “Gaming in the Modern Age”. Have an RPG article idea set in Information Age Earth? Contact us for guest blogger opportunities!
  • Campaign Season is upon us. Sign Up for our military-themed RPG Blog Festival hosted here at The Gamer Assembly. It runs from 19-26 March 2012.
  • Only 45 Gaming Days Until PAX East! If you’ll be in Boston on Easter weekend April 6-8, you owe it to yourself to attend the best gaming con. Three-day passes have sold out, but you can still pick up day passes. We’ll be there running a panel on Saturday, April 7 at 12:30pm in the Merman Theatre. Will we see you there?

Away

Content from people involved with The Gamer Assembly posted elsewhere across the Internet.

  • On Keeping Time by T.W.Wombat muses about timekeeping methods without clocks. Bonus pics of the proposed Trainhenge project at Stockton-on-Tees.

Notes From Abroad

Other interesting articles and cool links.

Wizards of the Coast went public with their announcement about the next edition of D&D on Monday 09 January 2012. We’re collecting D&D Next links in our wiki. If we’ve missed any good ones that you’ve read, feel free to let us know in the comments or join us in the chat.

  • The Best of 2011 Podcast at RPG Countdown counts down the top 100 best-selling gaming items of 2011. Take a listen, then buy one from your local game store. If you mail your receipt to RPG Countdown, you and your FLGS are both in the running for $2011 (cash for you, online ads for your FLGS).
  • In Places Deep has an ongoing Monster Monday series including this week’s twisted Treant variant, The Groan. It’s written for AD&D, but it’s another great series to mine for ideas to use in any system.
  • Map Fu gives us some mapping tips from Chris Perkins to make your Battlemat downright attractive at your game table.
  • Piracy’s antidote involves customer service: giving the customer what they want for a decent price. The Oatmeal tried to watch Game Of Thrones and this is what happened.

MetaRoundup

A roundup of roundups featuring links of interest to the tabletop RPG community.
Please let us know about other weekly roundups in the comments!

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by | February 21, 2012

How’d you like a print tabletop RPG magazine?

Call to Assembly, issue 1

Call to Assembly, issue 1

We love print magazines. We love the feel of paper, the ability to curl up in bed and peruse the corners of a publication stuffed with content.

So, we’ve collected a bunch of our best blog posts into the Call to Assembly, the first issue of a print magazine. This issue is 36 pages covers our first two months’ worth of blog posts. You can buy it on Lulu for US $7.99 (plus shipping).

This issue includes most of the content from our post-apocalyptic setting 3 Generations After The End, Brian Liberge’s Weeping Angels creature from StufferShack, and much more.

Enjoy!

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by | February 20, 2012

Modern Assembly: A 4e Hack

Detective Shoot by Jef Harris

I’ve wanted to work on a modern update of 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons for a long time. It may seem counter intuitive at first glance. D&D is not a modern game. Dungeons and Dragons celebrates medieval fantasy where the most modern piece of technology is a trebuchet (if even that) and magic isn’t just a tale but is a real part of many people’s daily life. Seems like a strange place for guns and computers.

It turns out I’m not the only person who thinks this is a good idea, so the Gamer Assembly is joining me on this quest. We’re not the first to do this. Dave Chalker worked on the 4th Power Project a couple of years ago. Casey Steven Ross wrote about his work updating d20 Modern for his home game over on DMG 42. There was an even fuller project I found linked on Enworld as well, but as of this writing their forums are down.

So if so many people have done this before, why are we doing it again? Well, what’s come before just isn’t exactly what we want. I absolutely respect the work they’ve done, and they’ve given us a reference that makes our job a lot easier. They have updated d20 Modern so that it’s more in line with the feeling of 4e and its mechanics. We are not doing that. We’re giving 4e Modern options.

I love 4th Edition. It’s the game my players want to play. I just want guns and cars!

We are building an expansion to the current version of Dungeons & Dragons. We want you to be able to play that new cleric build you’ve been looking at. We want your rogue to hack the Lich’s Defense Grid. We want you to be able to gun down a Dragon! Perhaps, most importantly, we want you to be able to do this while still playing the game you love.

Modern Assembly is being built with a few major goals in mind:

  1. Keep as much of the currently available 4e content as straight-out-of-the-box useful as possible.
  2. Only create what needs to be created, with a focus on mechanics that are modular and/or easily incorporated.
  3. Support as many variations of modern fantasy as possible.
  4. Keep it fun and action focused.

To that end, we are not designing any new races or classes. Most Modern Fantasy games are already human centric. Any additional races needed will be very dependent on the setting that you choose to play in. They may already exist, like the Vampires from Heroes of Shadow, or are likely easily skin-able (Warforged can easily replace most robots or cyborgs). Either way, new races would be better suited to a setting supplement and not this core set.

The current list of classes available in 4e is a long one. They run the gamut of power sources, ranges, and roles. Modern humans aren’t more powerful than capable of medieval humans, we’ve just have more knowledge and more stuff. We’ve broken the 4e mechanics slightly to accommodate this. Instead of writing new classes based around knowledge and equipment, we’re making new backgrounds and themes, that grant you the ability to take Modern Skills and Modern Equipment. So if you want to play a trained mercenary you could take the Ranger or Warlord Class with an Ex-Military Background. A nerdy librarian might be an Ardent, Bard or Rogue with the Scholar Theme.

This is an ongoing project, instead of a monthly theme like 3 Generations from the End. That means you’ll occasionally see posts on it, but you should still see other things churning through at the same time. There’s also no hard end date on the project, but a personal goal of mine is to be able to run a Play Test at PAXEast.

If you have any ideas, comments, or concerns please throw us a comment. We love to have feedback. Otherwise keep your eyes on this page for new Modern Assembly content coming soon.

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by | February 18, 2012

Campaign Season: Delayed Action

Overwhelming ForcesThe best-laid plans rarely survive contact with the enemy. In my case, my day job has transformed over a weekend installation from developer to support manager. Campaign Season fell through the cracks, and I didn’t have the resources to properly promote it and generate interest.

So we’re going to push it out by a month and shake the bushes a bit more. I’ve edited the dates in the announcement post, so point interested parties there for now. If you’re interested, please follow the directions and leave a comment at the signup page.

Now get out there and start thinking up devious new angles to attack war from.

Thanks for your patience and continued interest!

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by | February 13, 2012

Weekly Assembly: Campaign Season

Short list this week here in the Weekly Assembly. Between being sick and having a new system go live this weekend, plus prepping for Campaign Season, it’s been a hectic week. But there are still plenty of tasty links. Carry on!

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

  • Campaign Season is upon us. Sign Up for our military-themed RPG Blog Festival hosted here at The Gamer Assembly. It runs from 20-27 February 2012.
  • Only 53 Gaming Days Until PAX East! If you’ll be in Boston on Easter weekend April 6-8, you owe it to yourself to attend the best gaming con. Three-day passes have sold out, but you can still pick up day passes. We’ll be there running a panel on Saturday, April 7 at 12:30pm in the Merman Theatre. Will we see you there?

Away

Content from people involved with The Gamer Assembly posted elsewhere across the Internet.

Notes From Abroad

Other interesting articles and cool links.

Wizards of the Coast went public with their announcement about the next edition of D&D on Monday 09 January 2012. We’re collecting D&D Next links in our wiki. If we’ve missed any good ones that you’ve read, feel free to let us know in the comments or join us in the chat.

  • Strategy Game Meets RPG from Stargazer’s World thinks about adapting strategy games for use in RPG games. Start with a random base of operations, then expand the tabletop map depending on what the party decides to do next.
  • Yeh Varily was spotted in the back of the Judges Guild supplement Village Book 1 by Jeffrey Queen. Who says Wizards can’t be badass?
  • Gary Gygax Photomosaic as created by Weem out of images of D&D books really nails it. Nicely done. There aren’t many things I want a poster of any more, but I want a poster of this.

MetaRoundup

A roundup of roundups featuring links of interest to the tabletop RPG community.
Please let us know about other weekly roundups in the comments!

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by | February 13, 2012

Campaign Season: Sign-Up Page

  • Are you an RPG Blogger or Blog-Curious?
  • Do you want to write military-themed RPG content for online publication the week of 20 February 2012?
  • Would you like to be a guest blogger to see how this whole blogging thing works? Or do you already have your own blog you’d like to promote?
You’re in the right place. Welcome to Campaign Season.

If you want to write something for the Campaign Season RPG Blog Festival either for your blog or as a Guest Blogger here at The Gamer Assembly, please sign up by leaving a comment below. Please include the following information:

Name: (The name by which you’d like to be referred. Alias, nickname, or twitter handle welcomed.)
Personal URL: (Optional – Twitter profile, about.me, or personal site would work.)
Blog Name: (The name of your site you want people to see. If you don’t have one, that’s cool.)
Blog URL: (Your blog or whatever site you want to be linked. Article URLs will come later.)
Area of Submission: (A brief description of what you’re writing about, like “Item” or “Scenario” or “Optional Rules”. Multiple submissions are OK, just note each.)
System: (Something like “D&D 4E” if specific or “Any” if usable anywhere.)
Title: (The working title of your article(s). Try to be specific. Actual article titles will be used when submitted.)
Guest/Linked: (Use “Guest” if you want me to publish your article as a Guest Blogger. Use “Linked” if you’ll publish on your site and I’ll make a link to your article.)

Here’s a clean list of what I’m looking for to copy and paste into the comments.

Name: 
Personal URL: 
Blog Name: 
URL:
Area of Submission:
System:
Title: 
Guest/Linked:

If I were submitting, my comment would look like this:

Name: T.W.Wombat
Personal URL: http://twitter.com/twwombat
Blog Name: Wombat’s Gaming Den of Iniquity
URL: http://gamerblog.twwombat.com
Area of Submission: Optional Rules
System: D&D 4e
Title: Siege Weapons in D&D 4e
Guest/Linked: Guest

I’m going to try and read everything submitted so I can include a little blurb on your entry. Entries will appear something like this:

I’ll compile participants in a spreadsheet so people can more easily check out other entries. I would encourage people submitting something with a similar title or submitting to the same area to touch base with each other to steer clear of duplication, especially in a focused area like “Battlefield Terrain”. Maybe a grand collaboration will come out of that initial contact – who knows?

Before Signing Up, Be Thou Warned:
1) I reserve the right to play Editor on Guest Posts. I won’t publish any changes without author approval.
2) Bring your best to this festival. You’re showing off your work to the world. Please keep your writing focused, readable, clean, and tight.
3) I am human and have failings. If I miss posting or linking something of yours, please remind me.

We’ll have a logo soon, one way or another.

DEADLINE for participant sign-ups will be ongoing. The festival runs 19-26 March 2012 (EDIT: was 20-27 February), so please get your content delivered somewhere in that window and sign up before you deliver your content. That said, if sign up and you’re late with an article you promised, don’t sweat it. Life happens; I get that. I don’t maintain a black list for bloggers who are late or anything like that. Get it to me when you can and I’ll get it on the site when I can. Fair?

Thanks for your interest!

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